Facilitating conversion to organic production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent growth in the Canadian organic retail market has increased the need for research surrounding various issues. The need for information regarding the transition period to organic production has been identified by research committees, government officials and producers alike as one such issue. This study examines many of the current issues surrounding the transition to organic production using a two stage research program to identify and analyze many of the factors associated with the transition to organic production. Phase one uses 'face-to-face' interviews with practicing organic producers to identify issues relating to farmer's motivations for adopting organic farming practices, the problems and challenges faced during the conversion process and during organic production, the changing cost structure associated with conversion to organic production and the perceived benefits of organic production. Qualitative analysis of the information received from the interviews is reported and used for the construction of a postal survey used in phase two of the study. Phase two uses a postal survey to collect information on the factors mentioned above, as well as other issues identified during the interview process, such as the marketing of organic products. Quantitative methods including factor and regression analysis are used on the data collected to validate the findings from the interviews conducted in phase one and complete the objectives of the study. Results suggest that both Health and Safety and Environmental concerns are the predominant drivers for farmers to convert to organic production. The principle problems farmers experience during transition relate to the lack of support from government and marketing agencies as well as the nature of markets for organic products, particularly the power of the major food retailers and competition from imports. Producers also preferred to market and sell their products directly to consumers when at all possible. This research suggests that there is room for government involvement to help producers through the transition process as the non recurring capital costs of the transition phase are shown to be high. Development of a more efficient organic supply chain would be of great benefit to transitional and certified organic producers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".